Made with the shade: A striking Jeanne Gang tower elevates its lakefront setting in Hyde Park

Amid a construction boom characterized by blandness rather than boldness, Chicago architect Jeanne Gang’s new apartment tower in Hyde Park is a striking exception: a building that turns the important but prosaic task of saving energy into muscular visual poetry.

The poet Carl Sandburg, he of the big-shouldered Chicago, surely would have liked this building, which rises confidently to the north of the Museum of Science and Industry and the future home of the Obama Presidential Center. The 27-story high-rise, called Solstice on the Park, was made for the shade.

The recessed windows of its signature southern wall are slanted at precisely 72 degrees, the angle at which the sun’s rays beat down here on the day of the summer solstice. The arrangement, which shades the living space behind the angled windows, promises to ward off blinding light and the blistering heat that makes people turn on the air conditioner. In winter, when the sun is low in the sky, the angled glass should increase the amount of daylight that enters the building and, with it, passive solar warming.

Just as important, the sun-shading has produced a building of sharp contrasts and captivating rhythms that succeeds as both a stand-alone object and a part of the cityscape. It is one of the city’s finest new high-rises. And like much of Gang’s work, it’s as significant for the ideas behind it as for the building itself.

Architectural sun-shading is not new, of course. The French even have a term for it, brise soleil, which roughly translates to “sun blocker.”

The Swiss-born 20th-century modernist Le Corbusier famously used projecting concrete baffles and deeply recessed windows to cool his buildings in places with hot climates. For centuries, a carved wood latticework called a mashrabiya has shielded buildings in Arab countries from intense sun. Notable recent examples include architect Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum addition, which shades its tent-shaped glass entry hall with metal fins that open and close like a bird’s wings.

What’s different in Gang’s building is the way the angled windows create a sense of spatial expansiveness. Though they chew up floor space in some units, they compensate with fabulous, over-the-treetop views of the science museum, Lake Michigan and Jackson Park.

Located at 1616 E. 56th St. and developed by New Jersey-based Antheus Capital, which previously teamed with Gang on the 14-story City Hyde Park apartment high-rise, Solstice on the Park was designed back in 2006 as a condominium tower. Then the Great Recession halted its progress.

Reconceived as a 250-unit apartment building, Solstice underwent architectural changes in response to a tougher city energy code and tweaks to the building’s internal structure. But the essential idea, which grew out of the sun-shading provided by the undulating balconies of Gang’s 86-story Aqua Tower and an unrealized project of hers in Hyderabad, India, remained unchanged. And now, with more than 100 units occupied, we finally get to kick the tires.

The building’s benefits are apparent before you reach it. Replacing a small parking garage, it joins with neighboring structures — especially Windmere House, a lovely 1920s apartment building by the noted movie palace architects C.W. and George Rapp — to fill a gap in the wall-like row of buildings that frame Jackson Park’s northern edge. The building teases you forward as it peeks over the park’s trees. To its north, along South Cornell Avenue, a new four-level parking garage that serves Solstice and neighboring buildings fits nicely into its block because it has the right scale and smartly designed brick facade.

The tower’s signature south wall has a strong sense of animation, and not just because of the rhythms created by the vivid contrast between its angled windows (which sheathe living spaces) and flat walls (which clad bedrooms). The angled walls, made of glass and aluminum, reflect the green of the park as well as the motion of cars and pedestrians. The zinc that covers the building’s concrete structure appears light or dark gray, depending on whether the structure is flat or it’s angled. The proportions — a two-story module at the base expands to three stories at the top — make what could have a mere slab seem appealingly vertical.

Even the balconies created by the angled windows don’t disturb the smart look. As at City Hyde Park, which has an equally entrancing set of balconies on its south facade, the idea is an accrued beauty, one in which ordinary human activity adds to, rather than detracts from, the building’s allure. About one-third of the units have balconies. Ever conscious of her building’s impact on birds, Gang has designed the balconies with tiny white patterns that will help prevent crashes. The slanting glass windows, she says, are less likely to cause fatal bird strikes than flat glass.

Architectural fashionistas may lament how the building’s narrow side walls have lost the plantlike quality of their original design, which went from solids at the base to leaflike voids at the top. But Gang persuasively argues that a change to the building’s internal structure, which shifted wind-bracing walls inside, rendered that treatment false.

As built, the side walls, with their thin, buff-colored concrete panels, honestly reflect that change. They’re also visually compatible with the traditional architecture of the neighboring Windmere. Not every facade needs to call attention to itself.

Unlike typical new residential towers, Solstice on the Park does not have a high-rise amenity floor outfitted with such bells and whistles as an outdoor swimming pool and grills galore. Instead, its first floor serves that social role, with a library and a smartly designed lounge of interconnecting spaces. The expansive lobby brings the natural quality of the park inside, with poplar fins that conceal lighting and air-handling equipment.

As for the apartments, those on the south side are truly special. The angled glass makes you feel like you’re hovering over Jackson Park. The apartments on the north side, which have views of the downtown skyline, are handsome enough but not out of the ordinary. Throughout, interior details reinforce the exterior’s aesthetic. In the kitchens, for example, the palette echoes the building’s monochromatic palette and vertical expression. This is a significant upgrade from Aqua, where Gang only had control of the outside.

Rents at Solstice are not exactly cheap. According to one of the building’s managers, the monthly tab for the one-bedrooms, all of which face north, ranges from $2,000 to $2,900. Two-bedrooms, which have north and south views, go from $3,000 to $4,600. Three-bedrooms, which are tucked into the prime southeast and southwest corners, range from $3,800 to $5,300.

Even if you can’t afford those rents, you can enjoy the striking presence of Solstice on the Park. It remains to be seen, of course, if the sun-shading arrangement delivers the promised energy savings, but it’s already clear that Gang has wrung a high level of architectural creativity out of a building type that typically yields visual monotony.

Gang’s under-construction Vista Tower, now rising toward its summit of 101 stories, will become the city’s third-tallest building when it’s finished in 2020.